A bit (or a lot) of software advice for unique project.

[and303]

Hey guys,

I'm glad to see this community, and I hope you can help!

I'm a professional musician and finally decided to handle my own lighting for my tours rather than leaving it to the venues (yawn). After quite a lot of banging around, I've built a cube out of thick PVC, that I play inside of.

The front of the cube has highly reflective scrim, as does the rear, and both have short throw projectors hitting them from inside the cube. This creates a nice little 2 layer effect that so far looks good with the 3D rendered audio reactive video files. Inside the cube is a simple DMX controllable Chauvet Colorstrip that creates more than enough light to see me performing inside when the projectors aren't completely flooding the scrim.

Now, my problem. I initially was planning on simply encoding the video to support dual screen and leaving the Colorstrip to a foot controller. Now that I have this thing built, I reeeeaallly want to be editing the video and controlling the lights in sync. I'm a novice when it comes to DMX lighting, but not editing/MIDI/etc.

I'm looking for stable software that can simply send 2 60min videos to 2 projectors, and allow me to edit DMX in a timeline.

Does this exist, and if it does, what is the most stable, popular, and affordable option?

Thanks in advance for your help on my humble beginnings in trying to make my show more visually pleasing!

 

[metti]

Watchout, Avolites AI Server, D3, and many other media servers will definitely let you do this very easily but none are affordable. Isadora will also let you do this but with scenes and a cue-stack rather than a timeline. TouchDesigner will also allow this with a timeline but will probably present an excessive learning curve for what is a reasonably simple task. It wouldn't be the most intuitive but it would be possible to do this with QLab as well. You're best bet might be to use something like QLab for the video playback and then trigger a simple lighting controller via MSC or MIDI notes to control the light.

 

[AhClem]

Have you taken a look a ArKaos Media Master? Here's a link to a youtube video of their 2nd Tutorial on 'output settings' that may let you determine if it will suit your needs.
PM me if you have a chance... 1) I might be able to help with any question you have for controlling ArKaos via DMX/ArtNET and, 2) I manufacture a DMX controller and we're trying to offer more MIDI capabilites and I could use your suggestions from the musician's viewpoint (my past Tuba playing isn't helping me in the MIDI world ).